


Used Tools

by GulJeri



Category: Deep Space 9, Deep Space Nine, ds9 - Fandom
Genre: Cardassian vole, Childhood, Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 06:59:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8479645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GulJeri/pseuds/GulJeri
Summary: When Tain asks young Garak to complete a task for him, involving a vole that has been caught in one of Tolan's traps, Garak doesn't expect what is asked of him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: violence against a vole

Garak is sitting on the cooling soil as Prime's moon hangs low against the sky. The bright colors of daylight have dwindled to warmer hues. A little longer and it'll be downright cold. But the vole infestation in the gardens is particularly troublesome this year and the voles come out at night. Tolan has set humane traps for them and each morning he and Garak walk the garden rows and check the traps while Tolan hums his morning chants. At this time of the evening they have just finished baiting the traps for another night. Garak just wants to stay out a few more moments to watch and see if he can spot any voles skittering between the bushes and vines. 

He leans forward on his hands and knees when he thinks he spots a little form dart out from a clump of mekla vines. Garak flicks his tongue against his lips—it smells like a vole. But then again the garden has been so overrun with them that it always smells like voles, and vole shit. Above him a bush is loaded with dark violet flowers. They're as large as Garak's face and the color is so dark and rich that the petals look as though they were crafted from velvet. They're Rokassa flowers and Mila uses them to make juice. When the petals are crushed the pungent scent is unmistakable. 

Garak can't see the vole anymore—if it even was one—but he sits quiet and continues to watch. He becomes thoughtful at this time of the evening when it's no longer daytime, and not yet night. He feels a kinship to that strange sort of limbo. He is still young, and yet soon he will reach maturity, and knowing this is a strange thing. Sometimes he still feels very much like a child who still wants to cling to Mila's skirts, and sometimes he still cries when he has nightmares, and he has kept his favorite stuffed toy at the end of his bed. He won't sleep with it anymore but he can't bare to get rid of it entirely. His face is still soft, and round, and unblemished by hardship or trials that he might face later in life. His eyes and his smile retain an innocence that can never be duplicated once the dust begins to settle over the childhood years.

But he has also gotten taller. The soft baby fat that stayed with him for so long is almost a thing of the past. His hands are still a bit soft, and a little roll remains tucked up under his chin, but his body has become sleek and there are shadows of muscles in his arms from helping Tolan in the garden. Garak's voice has began to pitch up, and down, and squeak, and warble. It makes him self-conscious of speaking at all but in the end his Cardassian nature, which loves conversation more than almost anything, usually wins out over embarrassment. And just lately he has noticed his ridges beginning to become more pronounced—just a little. Mila thinks that he is exaggerating this, and Garak thinks that she just doesn't want him to grow up. Sometimes he doesn't want to grow up either.

He traces his fingers over his brow ridges. There he is almost certain that the scales are becoming larger and more defined. But along the sides and bottoms of his c-shaped orbital ridges, they remain soft, and faint, and almost dainty. 

Behind him a shadow falls over him. Garak recognizes the shape of it. He does not need to flick his tongue to scent the air but he does it anyway. Uncle Enabran has crept up behind him without a sound and there he stands with his large, dark, shadow falling over the boy. 

“Not many summers left to work in this garden, Elim,” Uncle Enabran says in a calm, easy, voice, “you'll be off to school very soon.”

“There's some time yet,” Garak says.

“Mm,” Uncle Enabran's shadow is moving. He is slowly circling to the front. Garak is staring down at his big black shoes and his wide form is blocking the sun as it finally sinks the rest of the way below the sandy horizon. 

Garak shivers.

“I have a task for you, Elim,” Uncle Enabran says.

Garak sits up straighter at that. He squares his shoulders.

“What is it?” he asks, his voice cracking on the last note. He looks away and over to the rokassa bush. The squeaking and cracking is even more embarrassing when it happens in front of Uncle Enabran. But his uncle gives a small chuckle.

“There is a vole in that trap,” Uncle Enabran points to the end of the row. Garak leans forward until the trap comes into his field of vision. The corner is sticking out from under a bush, “go get the vole, Elim.”

Garak scrambles to his feet and hurries down the row. He kneels in front of the trap, rests his hands on his knees, and watches the vole crash back and forth in the trap. It's frightened and Garak's stomach knots. He understands the primal fear of being locked in a small space. He knows the panic, the trembling fear, the desperation to get out—it's only a vole—he tells himself. Garak shifts minutely. He wonders how he'll be able to get the vole out without it escaping, or biting him, or clawing him. This, he supposes, is the challenge. 

Garak stays very still and waits for the vole to calm down. It finally stops hurtling itself into the walls of the cage but it is still scurrying in frantic circles. Garak isn't sure that Uncle Enabran would approve of this method, but he has he heard Tolan chanting to the voles sometimes. Uncle Enabran says that he's crazy. Mila discounts him as superstitious. But Garak has seen Tolan carrying the calm voles in his arms like pets to release them to another location. He has never seen Tolan with scratches or bites from the animal. 

Garak recalls a short chant that Tolan had taught him when he was very little. Tolan used to sit by his bed and say it each night. It was some sort of prayer for protection. Garak leans closer to the trap and whispers the words. He remembers them all but they mean nothing to him. Again, and again, he whispers until the vole was still. Garak is hardly breathing as he watches the little creature with fascination. It has a chufa just like his. It also looks to be young. 

Garak smiles at it.

“You're not so different from me,” he whispers, as his trembling hand reaches for the door of the trap. He is afraid the vole will bolt as soon as the trap is opened. Garak will have to be quick, and he isn't known for being quick at all.

He opens the door and grabs the vole by the back of the neck. He scoops it quickly and holds it against his chest with both arms, his hand still pinches at the loose skin on the back of its neck. The vole wiggles but it doesn't seem to be panicking. Garak gets to his feet and makes his way back to Uncle Enabran. It isn't as difficult as he has expected and he is feeling quite proud of himself.

“I did it,” Garak says, “it's here.”

He waits with anticipation tingling in his belly, hoping for a 'good boy' or a 'well done' from Uncle Enabran, or at the very least a nod of acknowledgment that he has completed the task to satisfaction. Uncle Enabran gazes down at Garak.

“Kill it.”

Garak's heart sinks right out the bottom of his feet.

“But...” his throat feels like it is full of sand and his voice crackles again so he stops speaking. It wouldn't matter anyway. If Uncle Enabran has said to do something then it must be done.

Garak kneels down on the ground with the vole still twitching against his chest. What does he kill it with? Should he try to snap its neck? He isn't sure he is strong enough to do that and the sound he imagines it would make has him feeling dizzy. He thinks he could bash its head with a stone. But again the crunch of bones isn't something he wants to hear. What other options does he have...

Garak is beginning to tremble. He doesn't want to kill the vole at all. Why does it have to die? Tolan could relocate it to another spot. He glances up to Uncle Enabran but his uncle is still staring down at him with eyes so cold they make Garak feel as though the temperature has dropped a few more degrees. 

Rokassa flowers are poisonous to voles. But Garak can't very well force some petals down the animals throat. He swallows. His hand goes to the pockets of his apron. A metal handle is sticking out of one of them. Garak's hand wraps around it.

He pulls the hand shovel from his apron.

The vole has gone completely still now. It has even began to purr.

Garak feels his throat constrict with all sorts of emotion and he is afraid that he is going to cry. His chest shudders as he forces himself to take deep breaths. If he doesn't he might faint.

Garak holds the vole to the ground with one hand. He pauses. He waits. He has no reason to wait and he shouldn't have. That only gives the creature more time to escape. Maybe he wants it to. But the vole doesn't move. It stays still and trusting beneath his hand. Garak forces his tears back as he raises the shovel. He is shaking so badly he is certain he is going to bring the tool down on his other hand instead of the vole at all.

But he brings the shovel down anyway.

He is trying to severe the voles neck. To decapitate it. But the blade hits the vole's shoulder instead. A terrible high-pitched shriek from the vole causes Garak to drop the shovel. The vole darts away and Garak bends over clutching his head and trying not to throw up. Beside him the shovel lays in the dirt with just a few drops of blood on the nasty, pointed, end.

Garak feels Uncle Enabran move past him, his shadow silently pressing onward, back towards the house.

He has failed.

The next summer the vole infestation has returned.

So does Uncle Enabran's shadow and with it the task to kill one of the voles.

Again Garak tries, and he fails.

The third year the task is presented to him again. This year Garak will go away to school. It is his last chance to prove himself by completing his Uncle's request.

This time Garak is shocked when his shovel comes down upon the voles neck. The spade wedges right in between the vertebrae. The vole shrieks, and shrills, and cries. The blood spurts. Garak is almost panicking—he thought it would die with one blow. But the vole sits there pinned with the little shovel and just writhes and squeals. Garak has to rock the shovel back and forth, saw it like a knife, grind it down through the spinal cord, and keep going until the thing is completely decapitated. The little eyes go foggy. The body continues to writhe a few moments longer. The ground is drenched with blood and Garak vomits into the rokassa bush.

He is still heaving when he feels a heavy hand at his back.

“Clean your shovel,” Uncle Enabran says, offering the dripping tool, “you will have use for it again.”

There is no verbal acknowledgment that he has done a good job but that touch is enough. It is a small gesture but it means approval and it is approval that Garak has fought hard for. His eyes are wet with tears, his stomach aches, the sound of the vole's terrified shrilling is still ringing in his ears and blood from the shovel he holds in his hand is dripping onto his pants—but Uncle Enabran is pleased with him.

That summer Mila has stopped arguing about whether or not his ridges are maturing. It is now quite obvious that they are; that Garak has changed. 

He is still soft, and slow, and awkward. He is still boyish. But beneath the light in his bright blue eyes is the hint of something darker swimming. Killing the vole has made him feel more... real, somehow. Garak doesn't feel like a child anymore. He is still uncertain of his future, still unsure of himself, but when the voles' head had been severed he had severed the remains of his childhood away from himself and he knows now that there is no going back.

Several years later Garak is a young man. He has been digging in the earth of Romulus, working with plants he has never seen before in person, and learning their ways. Despite being fully grown he still looks young. His face is still rounded with that softness and it gives him a look of innocence that works well as a mask but it is certainly a lie. He kneels in the dirt and pretends with his gentle hands that he has no more business than the dirt beneath his nails. He thinks of Tolan's chants and how quiet they have become, just shadows that lay over the distant years, strange voices that once walked with him in the garden when there had been nothing more seeping into the dirt but the roots of plants and life.

When he is finished with his task on Romulus he hands Uncle Enabran the hand shovel dripping with dark green blood—oh, not a literal hand shovel this time—the Romulan senator died in his bed, choking and bubbling on his own bloody foam, and Garak had forced himself to watch the light dim out of his eyes.

At least that time Garak hadn't been sick to his stomach.

His hands would hold many bloody shovels, and he would present them again, and again, until the action seems like a dance, like the most normal of things, as though his hands are meant for blood.

It is strange when he uses them to stroke fine fabrics. It is strange to remember how to make them soft again. It is a hollow feeling that he has nothing left to present to his uncle—to his father.

Garak overhears Quark and Odo speaking about a vole infestation in the station. He thinks about the headless body writhing in the dirt. He thinks about the severed skull with the foggy eyes staring up at him, and how the vole was afraid of small spaces like he was, and how it had a little chufa just like his. He imagines it on the floor of his tailor's shop surrounded in a pool of dark blood. But it is smiling up at him with his smile.

Sometimes, Elim, you wield the instrument of your own destruction.


End file.
